only way to achieve subservience from this unwilling Galatea is to kill her and turn her into an object that rivals her wax effigy. It is this twist on the Pygmalion myth that perseveres in film history, and this holds true in ...
Author: Jana Funke
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319958402
Category: History
Page: 280
View: 600
This book investigates the wide-ranging connections between sculpture, sexuality, and history in Western culture from the eighteenth century to the present. Sculpture has offered a privileged site for the articulation of sexual experience and the formation of sexual knowledge. As historical objects, sculptures also draw attention to the different ways in which knowledge about sexuality is facilitated through an engagement with the past. Bringing together contributors from across disciplines, including art history, classics, film studies, gender studies, history, literary studies, museum studies, queer theory and reception studies, the volume presents original readings of sculptural art in relation to antiquarianism, aesthetics, collecting cultures, censorship and obscenity, psychoanalysis, sexology, and the experience and regulation of museum spaces. It examines how sculptural encounters were imagined and articulated in literature, painting, film and science. As a whole, the book opens up a new understanding of the ways in which sculptures, as real or imagined objects, have fundamentally shaped approaches to and receptions of the past in relation to sex, gender and sexuality. Chapters 8 and 10 of this book are available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com.